Stoltze Design has just launched a redesign of the website for long time client September Productions. The previous website – developed with Flash – was online for around four years. Dan Driscoll, president and founder of September Productions, decided it was time for a change, and with that change came the opportunity to leverage a different technology for September.

With September Productions downsizing its directors it had on staff, the new site follows form and includes only commercial and documentary content from Dan Driscoll.

Early iterations during the design process included ideas to retain the site in Flash, and our idea behind the site to keep all content on ‘one screen’ without reloading the page each time a user went to a section, seemed like an obvious choice at the time.

We soon realized that a little bit of Javascript may help with this idea, and that Flash may not be the best choice of technology for the site. While we felt that it was perhaps a little too early to take advantage of HTML 5 capabilities, we resorted to keeping only the video content in Flash. We leveraged a technique of using only one .swf file for all the videos on the site, by loading the .flv files into the .swf on the fly each time the user selects a video, and destroying the Flash player when moving on to the next item. This helped in keeping load times at at a minimum. We  introduced a subtle scrolling motion with JQuery to move the entire stage, enabling users to navigate and browse the collection of work seamlessly.

Around three months of design, testing and development went into the site, and it was launched today. Visit the site at www.september.com